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A TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOS
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eventually won the Priestly Medal of the American Chemical Society. Other distinguished scholars including Gilbert A. Bliss, Otto Struve, Arthur H. Compton, William Bartky, and J. Harlen Bretz gave lectures, thus giving young College students a chance to encounter prominent scholars from across the division.29 The new course sought to integrate astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and geology into one yearlong survey. It started with the earth as an astronomical body, considering the structure of the universe, the nature of planets and stars and their evolutionary origins; it continued with a survey of essential components of the physical sciences, beginning with the fundamental laws of energy, heat, and temperature as manifestations of atomic and molecular motions, the nature of electricity, sound, light, and X rays as examples of the phenomena of waves; it then studied basic chemistry, chemical elements, compounds, mixtures, solutions, colloids, atomic weights and numbers, chemical transformations, the periodic system, chemical reactions, the atmosphere, ionization, and carbon compounds; and the course concluded with a study of the geological features of the earth, rocks, minerals, the formation of the mountains and oceans, climatic changes, and fossils as a geological record of life. Both the biological sciences and physical sciences general courses were organized in lecture/discussion format, having three lectures plus one discussion each week. Both courses styled themselves as “state of the art” in scholarly terms, and both profited from that crescendo of self-confidence about the importance of the natural sciences to human life that enveloped American research universities after World War I. The war
29. A detailed history of the course is provided by Thornton W. Page, “The Two-Year Program. Physical Sciences,” November 1949, PP, 1946–1950, Box 12, folder 5.